Hello golfers,

Welcome to another edition of our newsletter, this week we recap on our Black Friday event where I helped a total of 32 golfers, we talk about Tigers return, and I give you my thoughts in the lead up to Christmas.

Enjoy the read!

Let’s talk Christmas

These are solely my views which I feel are generated from being involved in retail at this time of year, when it comes to Christmas these days, there’s lots of things I’m afraid I just don’t get about it. I don’t get all the adverts targeting expensive gadgets for kids for ‘ONLY’ many, many £’s, I don’t get the push to stock up for ‘the big day’, I don’t get pop-up shops selling all manner of things which will be on clearance before Christmas Day, I don’t get Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Pre-Christmas sales, pre-pre Christmas sales and I don’t get shops and corporations pimping their wares by hijacking Christmas. Just sticking a fake tree up and giving money off stock doesn’t seem a very ‘Christmassy’ thing to do in the big scheme of things.

My earliest recollections of Christmas are good ones - it was never about religion for us so I guess we hijacked Christmas anyway and turned it into our ‘WinterFest’, but I fondly recall nativity plays at primary school in front of parents, festive parties, bumper editions of Radio Times and TV Times to catch Christmas specials, family turkey dinner followed by the Queens Speech and then the movie premiere whilst chomping chocolates. Now I’m all ‘grown up’(!?) I still love this time of year for many reasons and I DO totally get Christmas for all right reasons.

My favourite day to be at work during this season is often Christmas Eve, everyone is in a great mood and offering best wishes - I’ll have a tipple with the green staff and I used to enjoy a couple of frames of snooker and beer with Katie’s Dad who would meet me after work.

Since my first year here, we thought 'what could we do to encourage partners of members to visit the club?' and hosted an evening Christmas Greetings and eatings event in the Shop and gave vouchers out to any shoppers, but stopped it a couple of years ago as people came to ask "When is your sale night on?", that was never the reason we did it. Of course I understand the retail side of Christmas, Lewis would not have the career he’s embarking on in music if it weren’t for relatives giving him gifts of money - as an 8 year old he walked past the Katharine House Hospice shop in Stafford, saw a guitar in the window for £15, bought it and the rest is history. In fact for an outlet catering for an outdoor sport in winter, at the Pro Shop we appreciate and rely on the spike in winter trade that Christmas brings. Surely that’s one of the great things about golf or sport in general, that non-golfers can choose a gift which fits so well and I'm comfortable promoting solutions, service, improvement and the opportunity for more golf and better golf that Christmas gifts can provide, I’d be doing that whether there was a Christmas or not.

The lady members put a huge amount of effort into adorning the clubhouse at this time of year with traditional decorations and the greenstaff take care of the tree outside, contributing to the great atmosphere that seasonal events at the club create and enjoy, it looks great and it’s as it should be. You only need to ask someone about the Christmas Mixed event to glean that.

In the Pro Shop this year we’re well up for ‘WinterFest’ but you won’t find much of a festive display in the shop as it seems fickle to me try to generate retail golf sales this way, instead all of our promotions and goodies are geared to help your golf and any discounts are because we need to clear dated stock to make way for new stock arriving soon. Phew, now that’s off my chest and I hope I’ve explained myself, please don’t be under any illusions - we very much appreciate your business and your good wishes and we’ll all be dead excited come Christmas Eve for all the right reasons!

Black Friday

Thanks to everyone who came along to my Black Friday FREE events weekend. Apparently I haven't got the right idea of Black Friday either - I was supposed to focus on generating retail sales, not just help golfers improve their golfing. Nah, I think I had the right idea! Plus it was a good workout as I lost 2lbs in weight on the first day going up and down the stairs every 15 minutes for 8 hours!

A total of 32 golfers came to see me for one of the free events last weekend - either Club MOT, Wedge Workshop, Driver 10 yard increase or Ball fitting. I’ll show you what you can learn from the findings in the coming weeks but for this week I can tell you my challenge with the drivers was to increase their distance by at least 10 yards in the studio on the amazing GCQuad launch monitor and the average gain over the weekend was a whopping 22 yards each with most gaining the increase in a mere 3 hits.

This is made possible due to the approach to coaching that I adopt whereby myself and a number of coaches around the world have the philosophy that you can simply ‘Hit the next ball better’ and are able to fix impact in 3 shots - our goal is to actually ‘one-ball’ someone, but hey, we’ll take three. Sometimes we needed to alter the tee height or ball position after the three shots in order to witness the benefit and occasionally two fixes were needed, but sometimes it was literally one-take.

The comeback

Tiger Woods’ much anticipated return (again) to tournament golf takes place this Thursday, 300 days after his last appearance. There has been a structured daily social media campaign for the past two weeks with lots of renowned golfers all commenting how well he is hitting the ball. The cynic in me would find it odd that all the comments tell roughly the same story, commenting on his lack of pain, the sound of the strike and his cheerful demeanour - almost as if they were following a template?

 
I loved watching Tiger defending a lead and I hope he gets back to being able to compete. Only time will tell but it looks to me, from the videos that have been posted, as if he will still be having the two-way miss of hooks and blocks that have led to him pulling out of tournaments in the past. The draw of him for TV ratings can’t be underestimated though and it will surely be the most watched non-sanctioned Tour event to date.